Inside The Manufacture A Visit To Tudor Headquarters

The making of a Tudor watch today is in many ways similar to the making of a Rolex watch. Both timepieces are rightly renowned for their reliability over the long term, and since 2015, Tudor has joined Rolex as a maker of in-house movements. Where they occur, the differences in process, in components, or in materials typically come down to the challenge of creating a highly reliable and accurate timepiece while maintaining an affordable price. On a visit late last year to Rolex and Tudor's Geneva headquarters, I had the chance to observe some of Tudor's assembly and quality-control processes, and to document how these in-house procedures contribute to making a watch that has a well-earned reputation for reliability.

In the course of my visit, I also had the opportunity to sit down with Tudor's head of design, Ander Ugarte, to discuss the development of the Tudor Heritage Black Bay, a sports watch whose very creation was an exercise in extracting and synthesizing the defining characteristics of various successful vintage Tudor dive references.

While the parts that comprise Tudor's current selection of in-house movements are manufactured offsite at a Tudor-owned facility several miles from the Geneva headquarters, a great many operations, including R&D, assembly, and quality control take place right in the heart of Geneva.

As a sister brand of Rolex, Tudor unsurprisingly has one of the most impressive approaches to supply-chain management that I have seen in a Swiss watch factory (or anywhere, for that matter). Components from various partners and in-house suppliers all make their way to a centralized point at the Geneva HQ. Based on the references that are being assembled on any given day, the requisite components are called up electronically from a cavernous storage area beneath the Rolex/Tudor building. Inventory numbers for components are digitally cataloged and monitored to ensure an uninterrupted flow of parts to make watches.

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As I mentioned earlier, since 2015 Tudor has made its own movements for several of its watches. Here, you can see Tudor's in-house MT5602 movement being fitted with Tudor's own escapement, which is equipped with a silicon spring. Like its larger sister brand Rolex, Tudor operates its own movement manufacturing facility in another part of Switzerland. The movements are completed, and their escapement is added and adjusted, by watchmakers at the Geneva HQ.

Our window into the assembly process next took us to a station for setting dials and hands onto Tudor's in-house caliber MT5602, which currently powers many of the models within Tudor's Heritage lineup. Below, you can see a technician using a machine calibrated for correct pressure to affix the dial onto the movement.

Along the way, the dial and other parts are inspected for quality. Quality control is, in this way, built into the manufacturing process. If there happened to be an issue with the particular dial seen above, then the technician would be obliged to have the example sent back to the department that had forwarded it on to him.

The machine shown below is used to find the exact midnight position on watches with a date function before fitting the hands. It turns the crown until the date jumps. The noise of the date jump stops the revolution of the crown, and the machine comes back slowly to the exact midnight position. After this, the hands are fitted in the midnight position by another machine. This process allows Tudor to fit the hands as precisely as possible.

Next a technician performs a manual check of the hands that our hosts called "control the mark." In order to do this, the crown is turned to bring both hands up to the twelve o'clock position. Do they both point straight at 12? If yes, the time is further turned to six o'clock. Do they form a perfectly straight line? If yes, the watch has passed this test.

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Next, the movement is fitted into the case and secured on the perimeter of the movement with some screws. The person casing up the movement has to be careful to check for any dust particles during this process, because he or she will be responsible for securing the case back as well, hermetically sealing the movement inside. Once the caseback is screwed into place and the watch is complete, the alignment of the hands is checked once more to make sure that they still line up correctly at the cardinal hours.

After the watch is cased up, it's time to make sure that it is water resistant. This is accomplished through a multistep process that begins with lowering up to 100 watches (sans straps) into a water bath that is then sealed and brought to high pressure. The trays of watches are then removed and arrayed on heated trays, which warm the watch heads, and whatever air or water may be inside them.

Large droplets of ice cold water are then precisely applied to each watch's sapphire crystal. If the glass remains clear, that means no water has entered the watch during the test, but if it clouds up, that means that the ice water application on the outside of the crystal has caused vapor to condense on the inside of the crystal. Only the watches that pass this test are moved on to the next step, where bracelets and straps attached.

One of the very last steps in the assembly process involves attaching bracelets. Tudor technicians perform this procedure with a machine that speeds up the process without risking any unwanted scratches on the case or the bracelet. The technician you see here adds each side of the bracelet to the watch head before applying blue adhesive protection to areas prone to scratching, and placing the watch in narrow plastic containers for shipping.

I've toured many assembly facilities in the course of my years writing about watches, and Tudor's struck me as one that was remarkably well-suited to the mission it carries out. The operations performed by Tudor rely on both technology and the human eye to make sure that its famously reliable watches will remain so, all while keeping prices in line with Tudor's younger, aspirational clientele.